"We have to work the dark side, if you will, spend time in the shadows of the intelligence world."

Friday, November 6, 2009

Gettin' Uzbek Medieval: CIA sent people to be ‘raped with broken bottles’

Former UK Ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, has once again publicly denounced the torture, and the complicity therein, that Uzbekistan carried out at the behest of the CIA. This on top of the torture Karimov was carrying out at the behest of himself.

Murray spills quite a bundle of nasty, bits and pieces of which we've heard here and there.

The CIA relied on intelligence based on torture in prisons in Uzbekistan, a place where widespread torture practices include raping suspects with broken bottles and boiling them alive, says a former British ambassador to the central Asian country.

Craig Murray, the rector of the University of Dundee in Scotland and until 2004 the UK's ambassador to Uzbekistan, said the CIA not only relied on confessions gleaned through extreme torture, it sent terror war suspects to Uzbekistan as part of its extraordinary rendition program.

"I'm talking of people being raped with broken bottles," he said at a lecture late last month that was re-broadcast by the Real News Network. "I'm talking of people having their children tortured in front of them until they sign a confession. I'm talking of people being boiled alive. And the intelligence from these torture sessions was being received by the CIA, and was being passed on."

That ol' chestnut, the TAPI pipeline, is now insistently "on the table," as when Uzbekistan recently hosted the adoring Hillary Clinton, on a whirlwind tour of a fully targeted Central Asia, the oil and especially gas deposits in all of Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan of clear import in the grand TAPI pipe dream, something on the Afghan table now for quite some time.

All of which means, of course, that military presence in a decidedly hostile land must needs justification beyond its commercial purview.

Suspects in Uzbekistan's gulags "were being told to confess to membership in Al Qaeda. They were told to confess they'd been in training camps in Afghanistan. They were told to confess they had met Osama bin Laden in person. And the CIA intelligence constantly echoed these themes."